


God is watching your every move

by Lirazel



Category: Infinite (Band), K-POP RPF, K-pop, Korean Pop
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-17 02:10:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myungsoo is caught between red-eye flights and a film crew waiting at home, weighted down by a script in his bag and a name that's not his own, and he's not sure of much of anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	God is watching your every move

_“Up there's a heaven_  
 _Down there's a town_  
 _Blackness everywhere and little lights shine_  
 _Oh blackness blackness dragging me down  
_ _Come on light the candle in this poor heart of mine...”_

_\- Joni Mitchell, “This Flight Tonight”_

\--

 

“I saw you on the television today,” his mom says when he calls her from the airport. His flight is delayed, only twenty minutes, but that means twenty minutes less at home, twenty more minutes he has to wait to get back to Seoul, twenty more minutes alone in this airport, and so he feels twitchy. Mom’s voice, clear over the connection as if she’s right beside him, is comforting, that’s why he called. Well, that and he knows the rest of the members are filming _Sesame Player_ right now and wouldn’t be able to answer. 

“You looked tired.” She sounds like any worried mom anywhere in the world. “If I can tell that through all the makeup they cake on your poor little face, they’re working you too hard.”

“That’s the job,” he says, shifting the phone to his other hand so that he can shake open the zipper of his bag and pull his laptop out. “All the idols work this hard. Some of them work even harder.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” his mom says, sighs. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have let you do this. You’re so young to be working so hard.”

“I like it, though.” And he does, most of the time. Just maybe not right now. But it’s not a lie if it’s true most of the time. 

“I know.” Another motherly sigh. “Make sure you eat well to make up for the lack of sleep, do you hear me?”

He opens up his laptop, pressing the power button. It’s always on standby these days, because he doesn’t have the time to shut it down and start it back up. This way he can whip it out in the extra five minutes he has between schedules and check out on facebook what his old friends from his old life are up to. If he’s remembered to charge it up, that is. Luckily he has this time. “I’ll try,” he answers, because he doesn’t want to lie to her, but the truth is that their eating habits are the only things worse than their sleeping habits.

She tells him she loves him, reminds him to take care of himself, reminds him to take care of his dongsaeng, reminds him to remind his hyungs to take care of him, and he obediently agrees. He tells her he loves her before he hangs up, because the cameras aren’t around and no one recognizes him here in the Tokyo airport, so it doesn’t feel awkward. He hooks up his camera to the computer and transfers all the pictures he’s taken so far this trip onto it: his costars and the view from hotel room he’s staying in (just about the only good thing about the room), the crazy, colorful window of the toy shop he took for Dongwoo, some street fashion he knows Woohyun will be interested in. He breezes through them, noting that the composition in one is pretty good but the lighting in another could have used some work. He reaches the end of the new shots and the next picture that pops up is Sungyeol’s owl-face, right up in the camera lens, so close you can barely tell what you’re looking at.

Myungsoo rolls his eyes, remembering the day before he left (three days ago? He’s not even sure he remembers; time moves in fits and starts now, stretching out like taffy sometimes, then contracting so that he barely has time to breathe) when he’d tried to snap a picture of Sungyeol as he laughed at something Hoya had said at dinner. Sungyeol had heard the click, though, and of course Sungyeol couldn’t just let him take normal candids after that—he had to make his animal faces, scrunching and twisting his face till he was unrecognizable. That’s Sungyeol. So now Myungsoo’s got yet _another_ series of shots of angry baboons and sad turtles to add to his collection that’s already way larger than he’d admit to. One of these days he really needs to delete them all.

There is one shot, though, that he managed to get before Sungyeol noticed. The angle is really bad and the light is worse, but it was all Myungsoo could manage at the time. Sungyeol’s mouth is open wide in his laughter, and his eyebrows hadn’t been drawn in that day, and that shade of yellow is not a flattering color on him at all. There’s really nothing appealing about the picture whatsoever—he’s seen little kids take better shots on those disposable cameras. 

He hovers his cursor over the delete option for a moment, but then he hears the announcement that his plane is—finally—boarding, so he snaps the laptop shut, disconnects the camera, and stuffs all of the equipment into his bag as quickly as he can without hurting his camera. 

He doesn’t sleep on the plane, though he should—he should grab any spare moment of sleep with both hands. His eyes are gritty and his head feels heavy and he’s aching all over from the stunt training this morning. He leans his forehead against the window—it’s not nearly as cool as he wishes it were—and sticks one earbud into his ear, the other dangling down his chest, half-listening to Nell’s latest. He hadn’t known, once upon a time, that it was possible to be this tired, to feel like weariness is wrapping itself around you and slowly tightening each loop like a snake till it squeezes the life right out of you. He’s given up fighting.

His hand twitches for his cellphone, but you can’t make calls while in the air, and he doesn’t want to play any of the games he has loaded at the moment. He stares out the window at the inky black and waits for lights to appear.

\--

He makes a little too much noise—on purpose—when Geonam-hyung drops him off at the dorm. It’s past three already, and the light on the porch is still on because they knew he was coming. He kicks off his shoes and lets them thump against the floor, though he’s more careful when he sets his bag down—his camera is expensive. When he trips over a pair of someone’s sneakers, he lets himself fall against the wall, maybe bumping into it a little harder than he should. He heads to the bathroom—he hates plane bathrooms—and when he comes out again, Sungyeol is shuffling across the living room towards the kitchen.

“Could you at least try to be a little more considerate when you barge in here in the middle of the night and remember that some of us are _sleeping_?” he tosses over his shoulder, barely even glancing at Myungsoo as he passes. 

Myungsoo doesn’t smile, but the tension in his shoulders loosens a bit. He plops down on the floor, then sprawls out on his back, arms and legs starfishing around him. He can’t wait till _Sesame Player_ filming is over and they can move the couch back in. 

“Is it my fault if some people are such light sleepers that they wake up whenever a spider walks across the floor?” he asks, staring at the ceiling. He hadn’t turned the light on when he came in, but the streetlight outside the window gives him enough illumination to see and makes some interesting patterns on the ceiling.

“More like a drunk elephant lumbering in. If Sunggyu-hyung and Woohyun’s room was the one by the door, you wouldn’t dream of making that much noise when you come in.” Sungyeol has a cup of something in his hand as he emerges from the kitchen, and he sits down beside Myungsoo, leaning back against the wall. 

“Lucky for me that you’re the one in that room, then, right?”

“Oh, don’t think I won’t get revenge. I’m plotting it as we speak.” Sungyeol’s voice cracks a little, and Myungsoo smiles at the ceiling.

“Are you sure you want to start that war?”

“What war? It’s not a war if one side has no chance against the other, it’s just a massacre.”

“I can prank,” Myungsoo protests, and Sungyeol’s look clearly says that that’s a ridiculous thing to say. 

“Yeah, and you can act, too.”

“Hey.” Myungsoo kicks out and his foot slams into Sungyeol’s thigh, causing him to almost spill his coffee. Sungyeol makes a face at him. 

“I’d say the casting director was crazy, except you make a really convincing serial killer. You have the eyes for it.”

Myungsoo rolls his eyes. “The wig itches.”

“It’s ugly, too.”

Myungsoo snorts. “My mom said to let you all know that you aren’t taking good enough care of me.”

“Of course she did, worried about her precious baby. Tell her that we’ll construct a litter and start carrying you around on our shoulders. Will that be good enough for her?”

“I think she’d prefer if you referred to me as ‘your highness’.”

“You better start wearing licorice-flavored boots if you expect me to lick them.”

This is how their conversations go, bouncing around like pinballs, no bridges from one topic to another, most of it nonsense that doesn’t matter. It’s how it’s always been with Sungyeol, and lots of times the other members just shake their heads or look confused at the spirals of their conversations. It’s all so stupid, so inconsequential, but it’s what Myungsoo misses the most when he’s gone, mostly because he can’t replicate the conversations in his head, can’t imagine what Sungyeol will say next because there’s no way of knowing—even Sungyeol probably doesn’t know until the words actually come out of his mouth. 

He’s lying on his back, and he’s so aware of the way the house smells in a way he only is after he gets back from Japan. If they’re gone for a few hours or for the whole day, he can’t even smell it when he returns, he’s so used to it. But after a few days away, it smells so potent when he comes home, musty and a little mildewed and not at all pleasant—because it’s old, really old, and so many guys live here, it couldn’t possibly smell nice.

“We should go to bed,” Myungsoo says.

“We should,” Sungyeol agrees, taking another sip of his coffee.

Neither one of them move.

\--

It feels wrong to have a room to himself. He didn’t even have one of those at home; he shared with Moonsoo. Now he’s so used to tripping over seventeen pairs of shoes when he comes in the door, to borrowing Hoya’s toothpaste, to kicking Dongwoo’s toys out of the way before he climbs into bed at night that this room feels sterile and oppressive. There’s no one to mock what’s on TV with, there’s no one to yell at him when he leaves his dirty underwear on the floor, there’s no one’s elbow poking into his ribs as he brushes his teeth.

He turns over in bed, punches his pillow, and his phone dings. It’s a text from Hoya, a selca of him and Sungjong from some appearance they filmed earlier that day. _yeolie whined about you not being there leik a little whiny bitch,_ it says, and Myungsoo finally falls asleep.

\--

The one nice thing about the hotel room (besides the view) is the air conditioning. The window unit never goes out like the crappy one in the dorm, and Myungsoo can crank it as high as it goes and there’s nobody else to complain. He comes in, sweaty and wrung out from filming (it really is hot in Japan this summer), strips down to his boxers and drapes himself over the frigid air that’s belching out of the unit, letting it envelope him until he shivers and his teeth chatter. 

\--

Whenever he’s home now, the cameras are there. There are fun things about filming this show—getting to run around Hongdae and eat food from the street vendors and stuff like that is a lot less stressful than practice and television appearances. The PD told him right out that he doesn’t have to worry about being L, so he laughs when he wants to and yells back at the other guys, and it almost feels like they’re really playing. 

But there are the cameras.

There are the cameras, and Woohyun acts excessively fond of Sunggyu and Sungjong is all innocent smiles and Sungyeol calls him L. 

Myungsoo thinks he should be used to the name by now, should answer to it as casually as he does to the name his parents gave him, but every time it takes a split-second longer than it should for him to remember, _Oh, yeah. L is me_.

Everyone in Japan calls him _L-kun_.

\--

Somebody leaves a copy of _Death Note_ in craft services, and Myungsoo stares down at the page it’s open to. He never really thought that he resembled the famous detective even back when people told him he did, but right now the bags under L’s eyes are the same ones he sees in the mirror.

_I’m not the detective, I’m the killer._

His wig itches.

\--

“Do you actually like acting?”

It’s three in the morning again, and Myungsoo is lying on his back staring at the shadow-clogged ceiling, and Sungyeol is nursing a mug of coffee beside him. Whenever Myungsoo moves his bare foot, it bumps against Sungyeol’s hip, the waistband of his pajama pants, a strip of skin above. Myungsoo keeps jiggling his foot.

“Why are you asking me this?” They don’t talk about things like that. They have nonsense conversations, ones no one else understands. They don’t talk about things that matter.

Sungyeol shrugs (Myungsoo isn’t looking at him, he’s looking at the ceiling, but he knows). “You never talked about doing it until they called you for this. Had you ever even thought about it before?”

The truth is, Myungsoo hadn’t. Just like he’d never thought about being a singer—idol, whatever—until someone walked up to him on the street and handed him a card. But now there’s Infinite, and sometimes he feels like he needs it more than any of the other guys, but it wasn’t something he dreamed about, like it was for Hoya or Woohyun. Sungyeol didn’t dream about this either. Sungyeol dreamed about being an actor. Sungyeol still dreams about that.

“It’s not so different,” Myungsoo finds himself saying.

“Different than what?”

“Different than being L.” He hadn’t really meant to say that out loud, but now he has, and it’s okay because it’s three in the morning and the room is dark, and his toe is touching Sungyeol’s skin. It’s not so different than being L, except that everyone knows he’s not really Jiu and no one ever slips up and calls him that when the cameras aren’t rolling.

“The whole point is being different,” Sungyeol says, and he sounds…annoyed? Frustrated? Myungsoo isn’t always so good at labeling emotions. “Or at least being the same in a new way.”

Sometimes Sungyeol talks about acting and Myungsoo doesn’t understand. For the cameras, Sungyeol is the choding, energetic and ridiculous and heedlessly carefree. He’s those things other times, too, but not all the time, and when he talks about acting, he’s something else entirely. Myungsoo thinks that should make him uncomfortable, that other part of Sungyeol, except that it doesn’t because he’s still _Sungyeol_ somehow, and his Sungyeolness is always, always there. Woohyun for the cameras is a plastic mask that everyone knows is a mask, and if it’s sometimes hard for Woohyun to pry it off, well, that’s the price he pays. Sungjong for the cameras is painted-on makeup like the singer in a pansori: overly innocent eyes, all dewy and blinking extra-long eyelashes, his smile painted a shade of sweet that’s nothing like the one he gives when the makeup is washed away. Dongwoo for the cameras is a caricature of himself, the laughter his real laughter only a little bit _more_ , a little bit more often—the lines of the sketch exaggerated for artistic affect but still recognizably him. 

But Sungyeol for the cameras is just Sungyeol, only one specific side of Sungyeol. Sungyeol is one of those complex shapes from geometry class—so many sides and angles, maybe different views depending on how you’re looking at it, but still part of one whole. Myungsoo has always been good at math.

“I’m not an actor, though,” Myungsoo says, and he isn’t sure whether that’s really true or not, because he doesn’t know what he is—who he is, except for Myungsoo. “I’m just doing this right now.”

“So this is the only time you’re going to do it?” Sungyeol’s voice is a little sharper than it usually is, and the cracked edges of it might cut Myungsoo if he’s not careful. “If they ask you again, you’re going to say no?”

Myungsoo can’t decide if he wishes he was looking at Sungyeol or not. It seems like he always wants to be looking at Sungyeol, but sometimes doing it is just too much for him. He thinks this might be one of those times, but he’s staring at the ceiling, so it doesn’t really matter. “I don’t know what I’d say.” Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t dislike acting, exactly, and he thinks he’d like to know what it feels like to do it when he’s playing someone who doesn’t have blood all over his hands, when he’s doing it in his own language and it doesn’t require red-eye flights and cold hotel rooms.

Sungyeol _shoves_ him, and Myungsoo’s legs go flying, his body turning like the second hand of a clock with the force of Sungyeol’s push. His head hits the wall, too, but not hard enough to really hurt. “Why the fuck are you even doing it?” Sungyeol’s voice is demanding, cracking again, but Myungsoo doesn’t think he sounds angry, exactly. It’s something else propelling those words out, something Myungsoo can’t name because he isn’t sure he’s ever felt it before. Maybe it’s something that belongs to Sungyeol alone. “Why are you doing it at all?”

Normally when Sungyeol starts a fight, Myungsoo flares up right back, giving as good as he gets or at least trying (Sungyeol is way better with words than Myungsoo is). But Sungyeol doesn’t sound angry, just something else that might even be bigger, and Myungsoo is so, so tired. So he shifts his angle again so that he’s back to the way he was laying before, except this time he lets his foot rest completely against Sungyeol’s waist. Sungyeol’s skin has always been scarily soft (Myungsoo knows this just from the little pieces of it he’s been allowed to touch—the back of his neck, the underside of his wrist, and now the fleshy place right above his hipbone. Myungsoo hasn’t touched the rest of his skin, but he’s seen every inch of Sungyeol and he knows—just knows—that it’s as soft as it looks), and it seems even softer against the roughness of Myungsoo’s toes. Sungyeol is breathing a little bit harder than usual, and Myungsoo half-thinks he’ll shove him away again. 

“You don’t just say no when they ask you to be a TV star,” Myungsoo says to the ceiling.

“Don’t give me that crap,” Sungyeol snaps.

 _But I’m not joking, not really_ , Myungsoo thinks. _You don’t say no when they ask you to model, when they ask you to try out to be an idol, when they tell you you’re going to debut. I’m not joking._ It’s not something he can say. “I like to try new things,” he says, and he isn’t sure whether it’s a lie, but it feels like one in his mouth.

Sungyeol rises abruptly, the silhouette of him ungainly as usual and even longer and slighter from this angle. “I’m going to bed.” He kicks Myungsoo in the ribs as he passes, and it’s not gentle enough to be teasing.

Myungsoo knows he should get up and go sink down onto the pallet next to Dongwoo, let his hyung’s deep breathing lullaby him to sleep (he misses Dongwoo’s breathing in the hotel room—maybe that’s one of the reasons he keeps the air conditioning going all the time, so he can’t hear the lack of it). But instead he flips over onto his stomach and presses his cheek against the ground—it’s dirty, of course, and the makeup noonas would be appalled, but he doesn’t care.

“It’s not like I could tell you I did it because you do,” he mutters against the floor, a fraction of a decibel above silent. “It’s not like I could tell you I did it to be closer to you.”

It’s not like he could say those things, because they sound so, so stupid and Sungyeol wouldn’t be afraid to tell him that—“Closer to me? You want to be close to me so you make sure the Korea Strait is between us? You really are stupid, aren’t you?” He wouldn’t say it exactly like that; Myungsoo can’t ever guess accurately exactly what Sungyeol will say. But he knows it is stupid, and that Sungyeol would make that clear, and maybe Myungsoo is stupid, too.

Maybe Myungsoo is the stupidest of all.

\--

Myungsoo sits down in a corner with a carry-out container of udon and his script, and he flips through the pages as he eats. The paper is pristine, and the scatter of his typeset handwriting—a few reminders about pronunciation and a note or two about things the director has said—looks like it belongs in the margins. Sungyeol’s scripts are always dog-eared and marred by his careless scrawl, almost more notes about motivation and character arcs than actual lines, cramped in between the printed words. Myungsoo has watched Sungyeol study his lines, sprawled out on Sungjong’s bed and looking across the chasm between the bunk beds as Sungyeol scowls down at the script and taps a pen against his lips. 

“Imagine how pleased your mom would have been if you’d studied that hard back in school,” Myungsoo had teased once. But Sungyeol had just given him a brief glare before returning his attention to the script in his lap, completely rejecting Myungsoo’s invitation for a round of bickering, and after a few minutes, Myungsoo had climbed down from the bunk and gone to watch TV in the living room with Sunggyu. When Sungyeol emerged later from his bedroom, he had dark ink smeared by the corner of his mouth—Woohyun had been the one to roll his eyes and grab a wet napkin to clean it away.

Myungsoo waited until Sungyeol was in the shower and pulled the script out of Sungyeol’s bag. He turned the pages carefully, scanning the words Sungyeol had written, all the little details of backstory and emotional drive that Sungyeol had written. _Does he make that stuff up himself?_ Myungsoo wondered, dragging his fingertips over the words. _Or is it already there and he just knows how to see it?_

When he heard the water go off in the bathroom, he shoved the script back into the bag and went out to find a snack.

Now, hundreds of miles later, Myungsoo squints down at the page and tries to see what Sungyeol sees.

He never picks up his pen.

\--

Myungsoo feels like he spends more time in planes lately than he does in his own bed. He tries to look out the window and catch a glimpse of the smoky grey of night clouds, but he can’t make them out over the glare of the reflected lights from inside. He looks down at his phone in his hand, brushes his thumb against it and the screen lights up again, the text from Sungyeol still pulled up.

_we had 2 clean 2day & it was so gross my bones r jelly now i hate you lucky bastard. woohyunnie & i were funny tho_

When he reaches home, climbing the stairs in the humid cricket song-laced night air, the house smells like cleaning chemicals, astringent and unfamiliar, at least until Sungyeol brews his coffee.

\--

Before he leaves, Dongwoo always hugs him so hard he thinks his bones might shatter. “I’ll miss you, L-soo,” he says, and Myungsoo clings back, breathing in the smell of Dongwoo.

He doesn’t hug Sungyeol, because Sungyeol isn’t the huggy type, but Sungyeol punches him on the shoulder and says, “You better hurry back—if you keep missing episodes of _Sesame Player_ the fans will forget all about you.”

Myungsoo doesn’t beam the way he wants to, he just says something snarky about how no one could possibly forget him because he’s the visual (which starts a round of teasing about his lack of presence that doesn’t end until he closes the door of the van), but he smiles later as he tries to get comfortable in the plastic airport seat as he waits for his plane.

\--

Practicing by himself is hard. He feels so self-conscious with only his own reflection in the mirror, without the other guys’ figures in his peripheral vision. He knows he isn’t a good dancer, never has been, and he has to work harder than the others just to master the steps. He doesn’t mind hard work, but it just feels harder without being able to watch Hoya and learn from his perfect technique, without Dongwoo’s laughter when they take breaks, without Sungyeol throwing him a water bottle when he can tell Myungsoo needs one.

He goes through the motions again and again and again till he feels like the instructions are inscribed on his bones, but he knows that he’ll probably have to relearn things all over again when he’s finally with the guys—there’s no one here to correct him when he’s off just enough that he can’t tell but that anyone watching could, and he’ll have to unlearn the mistakes when he can practice with the other members.

He’s alone, so he could take breaks whenever he wants, but he tries to decide when Sunggyu would call a pause and only stop then. He has to get his own water bottles.

\--

The stress is taking a toll on his body—his muscles feel perpetually knotted up, his eyes are always too dry, he’s breaking out right and left like he hasn’t left puberty behind. But it’s the hair clogging up the drain of the tub after he showers that unnerves him the most.

If any of the members were here, he’d make a joke about how he’ll have to be bald for the next concept, but they aren’t, so he just fishes the hair out and throws it in the trash.

\--

Another plane, another night, nose of the jet pointed towards Japan, but this time it’s different: all the members are headed for the Japanese showcase, and Sungyeol is beside Myungsoo. He isn’t very good company on planes, whining and fidgeting half the time, insisting on studying his lines when Myungsoo just wants someone to talk to, snoring when he sleeps. But Myungsoo can hear Woohyun and Dongwoo laughing behind him, knows that Sunggyu has his earbuds in and is listening to Nell, and Sungyeol is right beside him. 

He slides the window cover down and doesn’t look out into the darkness, instead falling asleep on Sungyeol’s (bony) shoulder, and even though Sungyeol smacks him awake and nags him about drooling all over his shirt, it’s still some of the best sleep Myungsoo’s gotten in longer than he can remember.

\--

He’s so tired during practice, and he keeps messing up, his elbow not quite high enough and Sunggyu isn’t satisfied. Myungsoo keeps his eyes averted, feeling sweat itch its way down his cheeks and neck, and he knows the cameras are trained on him. He answers respectfully when he can and doesn’t answer at all when he knows the words will come out angry and hot. Sunggyu is the leader, and they’re known for 99.9% synchronicity, and even if Myungsoo has been trying so hard he thinks the effort might kill him, that doesn’t matter if he’s off tomorrow at their comeback. Infinite deserves better; Infinite deserves everything. So he sends his mind off somewhere else where he doesn’t have to hear the sharp words, where they won’t pierce him so that the banked anger drips out lava-hot. It almost works.

Woohyun tries to break the tension, reminiscing and being silly and singing ridiculous songs, and the others join in even if the tension is still varnishing the room. Someone mentions Sungyeol having to practice by himself, not having time to meet with the others because of his drama, and Myungsoo imagines Sungyeol in front of a mirror somewhere just like Myungsoo has been, going through the motions over and over and over again. Somehow, it makes him feel better.

\--

Something inside Myungsoo leaps when the front door opens, but he stays still, not moving from his position on his back, not even raising his head to watch as Sungyeol kicks off his shoes. But he feels each step of Sungyeol’s approach, not just through the vibration of the floorboards, but as though through the air between them, thrumming right into his skin and bones. Sungyeol stops beside him, but he’s just out of sight unless Myungsoo wants to crane his neck—which he doesn’t (or at least he won’t).

“Why aren’t you sleeping? If you look like someone punched you in both eyes tomorrow like you have been lately, Sunggyu-hyung will eat you alive.”

Myungsoo doesn’t answer because Sungyeol can almost always tell when he’s lying and the only true answer would sound stupid, even if—maybe especially because—it’s three in the morning and the room is dark.

“Hey.” Sungyeol kicks him in the side—without much force at all, barely a tap. “I asked you a question.”

Myungsoo ignores it again. “How was filming?”

Sungyeol snorts. “Whatever. Are you going to lay there all night?”

“We got to speak banmal to the hyungs tonight. And we ate a lot of chicken.”

“Are you bragging? That when you miss filming we end up having to clean, but when I miss, we speak banmal and have chicken?”

“Yeah. I’m bragging. Aren’t you jealous?”

“No. I couldn’t ever be jealous of you, not when you’re so pathetic.”

He’s still standing and Myungsoo wonders if he’s going to stay like that all night or if he’ll walk away and into his room or if he’ll sit down. He kicks out and ends up swiping Sungyeol’s leg, and he waits to see if Sungyeol can decipher it as an invitation. After a moment, Sungyeol moves towards the kitchen, and again Myungsoo can feel each step. He listens to the sounds of Sungyeol making a cup of coffee—peeling the top off the can, scooping out the grounds, filling up the pitcher with water and pouring it into the machine, the dripping of each drop. 

Myungsoo might fall asleep during the time it takes for the coffee to brew, but he wakes up again when Sungyeol settles down on the floor beside him.

“Did Sunggyu-hyung’s eyes disappear when you called him Sunggyu-ah?”

Myungsoo huffs a laugh; he doesn’t have the energy for anything else. “He didn’t like it at all, but he pretended like he didn’t care. Dongwoo-hyung laughed and laughed. And Hoya told that story about the kids thinking he and leader were beggars again.”

Myungsoo can hear the sip Sungyeol takes of his coffee. It would take so little energy—even with almost all of it wrung out from the hours and hours of practice (and then the cameras) earlier, he knows he has just enough left—to roll over and put his head in Sungyeol’s lap, but of course he can’t, so he just listens to the sound of Sungyeol breathing and creeps his hand across the floor, searching.

“By the time we have to do our military service, we’ll have heard every one of each others’ stories so often that we’ll want to kill each other,” Sungyeol says, and Myungsoo can’t decide if he sounds bitter or amused. Probably both, knowing Sungyeol. “They definitely shouldn’t provide us with weapons.”

Myungsoo doesn’t like to think about military service, doesn’t like to think about what it will do to Infinite, so he just refuses to think about it at all. His hand slides across the floor, and he can feel crumbs and maybe some lint between the wood and his palm.

“I can already answer every single question for all of you,” Myungsoo agrees, and that’s when his hand finds Sungyeol’s ankle. 

“Shit!”

Myungsoo finally raises his head to find Sungyeol swiping at a spot of coffee on his jeans. Sungyeol glares at him. “What the hell are you doing? Your hand is freezing—you scared me to death! You can’t just go grabbing at people like that!”

Myungsoo keeps his fingers wrapped around Sungyeol’s ankle, though, the soft skin layered over the bone. “Is it worth it? Trying to do the idol thing and the actor thing at the same time?”

“What? Let go of me, you freak.”

Myungsoo doesn’t. “You never get to practice with the members and you’re always going back and forth and you’re so stressed out—Woohyun-hyung’s worrying over you, he kept talking about it during filming today.”

Sungyeol shakes his leg, clearly hoping to dislodge Myungsoo’s hand, but Myungsoo just holds on tighter. “Why are you asking me this?” Sungyeol demands, sounding testy, and Sungyeol sounds testy a lot, especially lately.

“I just want to know.”

Sungyeol finally gives up on trying to break Myungsoo’s grip—not that he tried very hard, he didn’t even reach down and try to pry Myungsoo’s fingers away with his own—and lets his foot thump back against the floor. “You’re doing all that, too, is it worth it for you?” The dryness of his tone is layered thin over something else, something Myungsoo can’t name, so he doesn’t try.

What Myungsoo wants to say is, “If it is for you,” but he can’t say that because that sounds stupid, so he just stays silent. 

Finally Sungyeol sighs, and Myungsoo hears the quiet thud of his head falling back against the wall behind him. “It’s worth it if I can keep acting like I want to. It’s worth it if something comes of it, if I get what I want in the end.”

If something comes of it. 

“Yeah,” Myungsoo says, and he isn’t sure of what he means by that so Sungyeol definitely has no idea, but Sungyeol doesn’t push it, for once not picking away at things in that way of his.

The air conditioning here doesn’t hum pleasantly like the one in the hotel room Myungsoo left in Japan (the one that’s waiting for his return); it creaks and wheezes like an old man overexerting himself. The room isn’t as cold as Myungsoo likes it, either, whether because the other members have set the thermostat too high or because the ancient air conditioner just doesn’t have the fight left to battle back the heat. 

“We should go to bed,” Sungyeol says after a few minutes.

“Yeah,” Myungsoo agrees.

Neither one of them move.


End file.
